Trump's War With Palm Beach

Donald Trump’s noisy, rule-breaking entrance into national politics may be a revelation for some. But not for residents of his home town of Palm Beach, Fla., where for the past 30 years he has shattered old-money conventions and sensibilities with the same thin-skinned, sue-you-in-a-heartbeat, self-congratulatory ethos that has made him such a mesmerizing character on the national stage.

For decades I’ve watched most of this comedy-drama from my perch at The Palm Beach Post, where I work as a local news columnist on the hunt for humor. And when humor’s your bag, there’s no greater gift than Donald Trump. A gift I must now share, reluctantly, with my countrymen.

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Where do I begin, America, to tell you what life dominated by The Donald is like—an experience you too will have if he enters the White House? There are many stories, but I think I should start with the flagpole on the front lawn of Mar-a-Lago, the 17-acre Palm Beach property Trump bought decades ago.

First you should know that Palm Beach is a town where measurements matter. Leaf blowers require inspections to verify they emit no more than 65 decibels from 50 feet away. Residents holding a garage sale are restricted to one sign that can’t be more than 4 square feet in size. And residents flying flags on their property are restricted to flagpoles that are no higher than 42 feet and flags that are a maximum of four feet by six feet.

In October 2006, without getting a permit or a variance, Trump put up an 80-foot flagpole on the front lawn of Mar-a-Lago, with a car dealership-sized American flag of 15 feet by 25 feet flying from it.

Oh, he knew what he was doing. Trump, after all, had been fighting with the town poohbahs from the very moment he’d crashed into the complacent, clubby world of Palm Beach to buy Mar-a-Lago—the former estate of blue-blooded cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post—which turned out to be one of those great deals he couldn’t afford. More on that later.

Trump knew from experience that Palm Beach was a stickler for adherence to its ordinances. He had once paid a $5,000 fine to the town for replacing a section of dead hedges with replacements that weren’t quite tall enough.

But Trump had bigger changes in mind than merely out-flagging his neighbors. He was plainly inviting a lawsuit. The town council took the bait, citing the oversized pole and flag as violations of the town code, and fining Trump $250 a day for every day they remained on the estate.

“The town council of Palm Beach should be ashamed of itself,” Trump responded. “They’re fining me for putting up the American flag. This is probably a first in United States history.” He went on Nancy Grace’s national TV show to complain that the Town of Palm Beach was unpatriotic. Then, ignoring the town’s violations, which grew to be a $120,000 fine and counting, he filed a lawsuit against Palm Beach, asking for $25 million in damages to what he called an abridgment to his constitutional right to free speech.

Tucked into his patriotic posturing was a completely unrelated legal matter that he made part of his multi-million lawsuit: a complaint about the town code that requires large commercial enterprises to be “town serving.” The town requires proof from local businesses that at least 50 percent of their business comes from town residents. So, for example, when Neiman Marcus opened on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, it was allowed to do so by promising that it would only advertise in the town’s newspaper, and not in publications that circulated to shoppers who don’t live on the island.

For Trump, eliminating the “town serving” requirement would mean that he could offer more memberships to his Mar-a-Lago social club to people who had no connection to Palm Beach, making it easier for him to keep his club full. Softening up the town on the flag issue to pursue some other angle was a classic Trump move. Though he has yet to get this particular exemption waived, Palm Beach has learned from experience that Trump’s lawsuits are never settled, just dormant. One of his Palm Beach lawyers said recently that the “town serving” issue is still unresolved and ripe for more litigation.

As for the flag, guess who won?

Trump eventually dropped his lawsuit over the flag, and in exchange the town waived its fines. As terms of a court-ordered mediation, Trump would file for a permit and be allowed to keep an oversized pole on Mar-a-Lago that was 10-feet shorter than original pole and on a different spot on his lawn. The agreement also called for him to donate $100,000 to veterans’ charities.

That’s some expensive defiance. But maybe you’ve got look at in a more Trumpian light. He essentially got what he wanted: The biggest pole on Palm Beach. (Paging Dr. Freud?)

Advantage, once again, Donald Trump. And for Palm Beachers, just another encounter with the human shock wave from New York.

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So it has been all along down here, from the moment in 1985 when Trump decided that Mar-a-Lago would be his personal castle. Mar-a-Lago, the last of Palm Beach’s estates to stretch from the ocean to the Intracoastal Waterway, was a single-family home of gargantuan proportions: Its Mediterranean-Revival-style mansion had 118 rooms, including 58 bedrooms and 33 bathrooms and a 75-foot tower that could be seen for miles. The property was roomy enough for its own 9-hole golf course and citrus grove.

Built in 1927 for Post, then the richest woman in America, she later willed it to the federal government to be used as a winter White House for American presidents. The home became a National Historic Landmark. But presidents didn’t use it and the federal government grew weary of paying for the $1 million a year it took to maintain it.

“The town council of Palm Beach should be ashamed of itself,” Trump responded after learning that his mansion was in violation of a town ordinance that limited flagpole height. After Trump went on Nancy Grace’s national TV show to complain that Palm Beach was unpatriotic, he filed a lawsuit against the town, asking for $25 million in damages. | AP

So the estate was put up for sale. At the time, Trump was a hotshot 39-year-old New York real estate developer who two years earlier had opened his signature 58-story Trump Tower skyscraper in Manhattan. And the federal government, eager to unload the Florida mansion, agreed to a $10 million sale—$7 million for the property and $3 million for the furnishings—in a contract that required Trump to put down only $2,812 of his own money.